Writing

Essays, reviews, and interviews on art, culture, technology, and the environment

Trigger: Gender as a Tool and as a Weapon, Elephant Magazine

Western society, often holding the belief in an eternally definite stasis of humanity, has a long tradition of insisting on binary distinctions (woman/man, white person/person of color, real/virtual, straight/queer, valuable/not valuable, pure/impure, presence/absence). Though its origins go as far back as Plato trying to reconcile his idea of the physical world and the eternal world of ideal forms, this bias began to take root during the Scientific Revolution and was further energized by the Industrial Revolution and twentieth-century capitalism. In today’s Information Age, deterministic binary opposition appears to have fully saturated Western society. Developments in quantum computing, however, reintroduce the notion that the universe relies on uncertainty and probability, thus making absolute binary distinctions irrelevant. Though it may seem ludicrous to imagine a world in which humans experience the idiosyncrasies of particles on an atomic level—a constantly shifting cloud of uncertainties and probabilities—metaphorical parallels offer a feast of opportunities to reconsider the centuries-old model of human identity.